A blog about individual and community development using new information and communication technologies, especially e-learning, open educational resources, open source, Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking, semantic web and other social software.

2015-10-28

Today the University of California expands the reach of its research publications by issuing a Presidential Open Access Policy, allowing future scholarly articles authored by all UC employees to be freely shared with readers worldwide.

Comprising ten campuses, five medical centers, and nearly 200,000 employees, the UC system is responsible for over 2% of the world's total research publications. UC's collective OA policies now cover more authors than any other institutional OA policy to date.

2015-10-26

You can easily connect any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a TV screen or even many projectors with the help of a wired connector adapter and HDMI cable. As long as the recipient TV, display, or projector has an HDMI input port, you can mirror the iPhone or iPad display directly to that screen. This is great for presentations, demonstrations, watching videos or movies, and so much more. The output video can be a maximum of 1080p HDTV resolution, and yes both video and audio are transmitted, mirrored from iOS to the TV screen.

""Show What You Know With Media" is a book series and website created by Dr. Wesley Fryer to serve as a menu, handbook, and map for teacher-leaders and learners in the twenty-first century who seek to develop digital literacies as multimedia communicators and help students "show what they know with media." * Mapping Media to the Curriculum (Volume I) explores the first six products in the framework: Interactive Writing, Narrated Art, Radio Shows, 5 Photo Stories, Visual Notetaking, and Narrated Slideshows / Screencasts. Videos in each chapter (hosted on YouTube) are directly linked for compatible eReaders and also linked via QR codes, so readers can optionally use a smartphone to view them."

2015-10-24

The real obstacle in education remains student motivation. Especially in an age of informational abundance, getting access to knowledge isn't the bottleneck, mustering the will to master it is. And there, for good or ill, the main carrot of a college education is the certified degree and transcript, and the main stick is social pressure. Most students are seeking credentials that graduate schools and employers will take seriously and an environment in which they're prodded to do the work. But neither of these things is cheaply available online.

Universities are supposed to be dead. These bastions of higher learning have been on Silicon Valley's hit list for much of the past decade, and disruption phasers targeting the industry have certainly been set to kill in the years since the global financial crisis.

And yet after years of efforts, we have arrived in 2015 and almost nothing seems to have changed about the way we get our degrees or even just our continuing coursework.

MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses – were supposed to be the vanguard of the new online education movement, surging to popularity in 2011 and 2012 following a rash of press about the end of higher education as we know it. Since those discussions though, MOOCs seem to have fared poorly.

Below is a collection of some very good iPad apps for creating educational movie slideshows with students. You can use your selected photos, add a video and/or a soundtrack and mix all together in a beautiful and engaging slideshow. While features provided differ from one app to the other, most of these apps let you use existing photos and videos to create animated slideshows.

As with many ideas which may be simply stated Prensky's world of 'Digital Natives and Immigrants' has been oversimplified and misunderstood. In part this is the danger that comes with relying upon a cultural metaphor and a consequence of society's love affair with neat dichotomies.

2015-10-13

From solar-powered irrigation to waste turned into electricity, African clean-tech entrepreneurs are developing innovative solutions to climate change that can be deployed across the continent. And in doing so, they are creating jobs and planting the seeds for new competitive sectors of the economy.

Whether you're interested in programming, graphic design, speech writing, or conflict resolution, there's bound to be a class for you.

Stewart-Marshall's insight: Mashable has curated a list of 45 online classes from providers across the web. They cover programming, graphic design, speech writing, conflict resolution, and more. All of these classes are free and none take more than 10 weeks to complete.

2015-10-12

The sheer scale of numbers of students led to bold proclamations of education disruption and a sector on the verge of systemic change. However, from the perspective of 2015, these statements appear increasingly erroneous as moocs have proven to be simply an additional learning opportunity instead of a direct challenge to higher education itself. Many of the issues confronting early mooc development and offerings could have been reduced if greater consideration was given to research literature in learning sciences and technology enabled learning.

2015-10-09

With so much information readily available in a range of multimodal formats, from text to multimedia, apps and social networking, we need to blend technological learning and critical literacy together so that students can critically appraise the information that they are accessing. Teaching digital literacy is something that can be embedded into regular teaching in all subjects at all stages of education. To do that, it needs to be explicitly taught and reinforced by every teacher in every subject in a way that is appropriate for students.

2015-10-08

InfoDev has released a report examining women's entrepreneurship in the Caribbean: Profiling Caribbean Women Entrepreneurs: Business Environment, Sectoral

There is a paucity of information on women entrepreneurs in the Caribbean region. This InfoDev report seeks to redress this and seeks to develop an understanding of the main issues facing women in their businesses and their future growth potential.

2015-10-06

For many children around the world today there are no artificial boundaries between being 'offline' and 'online'. The environments that children find themselves in are increasingly digital, as much of their socializing, learning, civic engagement and entertainment happens online. In many countries, children and young people are among the greatest users of this technology. Even in countries where overall internet penetration is low, it is much higher among the 15-24 age group.

2015-10-03

For almost everyone who is a part of the online world coming up with fresh content consistently is a big challenge. Practically every guideline advises that content should be engaging, informative and relevant every single time. Consequently, content curation has taken off in a big way.

Simply put, content curation is the process of curating relevant and interesting content from various sources on the web and putting them together and publishing them on a personal site or blog. As a result of the popularity of the content curation process, a number of content marketing tools have been introduced. These tools are meant to help in the process of content marketing and SEO and facilitate the process of curation...

2015-10-01

There are now more than 40 step-by-step lesson plans as well as chapters on different approaches and paradigms for exploiting video, such as how to use video in blended learning, task based learning (TBL) or content and language integrated learning (CLIL).